Brazil is making progress in the adoption of of next-generation protocol for Internet networking IPv6, according to new research.

According to data released by Google, 23.6 percent of Brazilian Internet users now access the Internet through the new addressing protocol.

As well as solving the issue of IPv4 address exhaustion, IPv6 adds a number of additional features in areas such as mobility, auto-configuration and overall extensibility, supporting a much wider range of devices that can be directly connected to the Internet.

Brazil now ranks 9th in the world for IPv6 adoption on the Internet, according to the National Union of Fixed and Mobile Telecom Companies (Sinditelebrasil). The entity says that the growth is due to the rapid deployment of the protocol by telecommunication providers, who have already adapted all of of their mobile networks to offer the IPv6 address.

Brazil is currently in the third phase of the policy elaborated by NIC.br, the body that oversees the distribution of Brazil’s IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, to deal with the exhaustion of IPv4.

In total, about 4 million IPv4 addresses have been reserved, and since February approximately 1 million addresses have been allocated.

Google has made a significant change to its Google Images search engine, in a bid to prevent people from downloading and copying copyrighted images.

When you now search for an image, you won’t see the ‘View image’ button. This used to allow people to view just the image on its own, and allow them to download the image without visiting the site.

This caused concern from the people who created and published those images, as not only were their images viewed and downloaded without people having to visit the site, potentially robbing them of an audience, but it also meant the images were viewed out of context, and without any information on usage rights or who to credit if you re-use the image.

Getting those clicks

As the Google search team said on Twitter, while the View Image button is gone, the ‘Visit’ button remains, hopefully encouraging people to visit the website before downloading the image.

Today we’re launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites. This will include removing the View Image button. The Visit button remains, so users can see images in the context of the webpages they’re on. pic.twitter.com/n76KUj4ioDFebruary 15, 2018

However, you can still right-click the image and select ‘Open image in new tab’ and download it that way. Still, it’s hoped that this move will make people more aware of where their images come from.

As the Google search team explains, “Having a single button that takes people to actionable information about the image is good for users, web publishers and copyright holders”, while also revealing that these changes have come about in part due to a settlement earlier this week with Getty Images.

Getty Images filed a competition law complaint against Google with the European Commission in 2016, which accused Google of “creating captivating galleries of high-resolution, copyrighted content. Because image consumption is immediate, once an image is displayed in high-resolution, large format, there is little impetus to view the image on the original source site.”

Google and Getty Images have now embarked on a multiyear global licencing partnership to solve this issue. While this change will be welcomed by many image creators, it may prove frustrating for day-to-day users who are searching for images for legitimate purposes.

The ‘Search by image’ button has also been removed, making it harder to search for similar images, however, reverse image search still works.

Watch what you embed: A federal judge in New York ruled this week that embedding a tweet on a webpage could constitute copyright infringement.

The case centered on a 2016 photo of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Taken by plaintiff Justin Goldman, who posted it to his Snapchat story, the image quickly went viral, spreading to Reddit before winding up on Twitter. From there, a number of online publishers – including Breitbart News Network, Heavy, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media, Gannett Company, Herald Media, The Boston Globe, and New England Sports Network – embedded a tweet containing the image on their sites alongside articles about Brady helping the Boston Celtics recruit basketball player Kevin Durant.

Goldman sued those publishers for copyright infringement, claiming he never publicly released the image.

“Having carefully considered the embedding issue, this Court concludes… that when defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff’s exclusive display right,” Judge Katherine Forrest wrote in a summary judgement opinion. “The fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result.”

Not everyone agrees. In a Friday blog post, Daniel Nazer, senior staff attorney on the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation’s intellectual property team, called the decision “legally and technically misguided,” and said it goes against “years of settled precedent.”

“Courts have long held that copyright liability rests with the entity that hosts the infringing content—not someone who simply links to it,” Nazer wrote. “The linker generally has no idea that it’s infringing, and isn’t ultimately in control of what content the server will provide when a browser contacts it.”

If backed up by other courts, this decision would “threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability,” Nazer added.

Frankly, the best place to catch the bulk of the 2018 Oscar-nominated films will be in theaters. But if you want to check off a few viewings from your sofa, here’s what Netflix has to offer.

“Mudbound”

Steve Dietl/Netflix

‘Mudbound’

Metacritic score: 85

Netflix picked up distribution rights to this period drama directed by Dee Rees after it screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The film received four Oscar nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay, and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Mary J. Blige. Rachel Morrison also made history as the first female to ever receive a Best Cinematography nomination in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s 90-year history. If you only have time to watch one film from the list, I highly recommend “Mudbound.”

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’

Metacritic score: 67

If you’re wondering what technical award this was nominated for, I’ll save you a search. It’s Visual Effects. That doesn’t mean this Marvel film isn’t worth your time. The Guardian films are humorous, visual candy that groove along in space to the tunes of classic oldies music. Plus if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth catching up on all the big Marvel films before “Avengers: Infinity War” releases in May.

‘Last Men in Aleppo’

This documentary on the Syrian Civil War will leave you on the edge of your seat. It follows the lives of three men who are White Helmets, an organization that does search and rescue after bombings. “Last Men in Aleppo” already took home the Grand Jury Documentary award at Sundance. It’s a heavy watch, but also a powerful one.

“On Body and Soul”

Netflix

‘On Body and Soul’

Metacritic score: 77

Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t have any Best Picture nominees available to stream. But it does have one Best Foreign Language Film nomination, “On Body and Soul” from Hungary. It’s a romantic, if not strange, story of two slaughterhouse workers having shared dreams that they are deer in the forest.

‘Strong Island’

Metacritic score: 86

Another contender for Best Documentary, “Strong Island” is an incredibly moving film about a family’s history and their struggles with racism in America. The movie is centered around a horrific tragedy in 1992, when William Ford Jr., a 24-year-old black high school teacher on Long Island was murdered by a white 19-year-old. Yance Ford’s documentary on his brother’s death is a heart-wrenching film that tries to celebrate William’s potential.

“Icarus”

Netflix

‘Icarus’

Metacritic score: 68

Bryan Fogel’s documentary “Icarus” about sports doping may as well be called a thriller; while making this documentary he accidentally uncovers a massive Russian doping scandal after meeting with a Russian scientist. “Icarus” is an insightful yet scary look at the complex world of sports and the politics surrounding them.

‘The Boss Baby’

Metacritic score: 50

Yep, “The Boss Baby” was nominated for Best Animated Feature. Alec Baldwin voices a baby who is a secret agent in a war between puppies and babies. I’m not going to try and sell you on the premise; I don’t get it either. But hey, at least there’s a film here you can watch with your kids.*

‘Beauty and the Beast’

Metacritic score: 65

*Actually, there are two films you can watch with your kids. 👍 This live-action remake of the animated classic received nominations for both Production and Costume Design. It’s not quite as magical as the 1991 version, but the film is still charming and well suited for a family movie night.

The Apple Park sports a futuristic design, but it seems that so much glass can be quite a pain. Apple employees are repoortedly smacking into glass walls, and the company could be violating California laws regarding workplace safety.
( Apple )

Apple’s new headquarters, the Apple Park, is reportedly causing trouble to employees who keep smacking into glass walls.

The $5 billion Apple Park is a huge ring-shaped office divided into workspaces called pods, separated by glass walls from the floor to the ceiling. It has a futuristic design inside and out and is considered a masterpiece that brings to life a vision of the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. It’s the creation of famous architect Norman Foster.

Glass walls and glass doors may create a feeling of openness, but they may also be a pain, literally. It seems that distracted employees often fail to see the glass panes and smack right into them, even getting injured in some cases.

Employees Keep Walking Into Glass Walls At Apple Park

According to a new report from Bloomberg, people familiar with the matter revealed that distracted Apple employees often walk about with their nose buried in their iPhones and they keep walking into the glass walls.

Such incidents are reportedly so frequent that some members of the staff even started sticking Post-It notes to the glass walls so they’d be more visible. The notes did not bode well with the building’s aesthetics, however, so they had to go, but there are reportedly other markings in place to make the glass more visible.

Apple reportedly faced at least two cases of staff smacking into glass walls and suffering injuries that warranted emergency service. MarketWatch obtained public records that showed that in both cases the employees only suffered minor cuts and did not need hospitalization.

Is Apple Breaking The Law?

The whole matter may seem funny at first, brushing it off as just some distracted employees not watching where they’re going. However, there might be a more serious issue at stake here, and Apple’s new headquarters may not meet some specific workplace regulations.

As MarketWatch points out, California law clearly states that companies should protect their employees and ensure they don’t risk walking through glass. To avoid such hazards, clearly visible markings should be in place, or the glass should have some barriers.

Data from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, however, shows that Apple has received no citations, which means that employees likely did not report the issue.

If Apple is indeed violating California law, it could eventually face fines, as well as other actions that would force it to take measures to ensure employees’ safety.

The nation state has survived wars, plagues, and upheaval, but it won’t survive digital nomads, not if people like Karoli Hindriks have something to say about it. Hindriks is the founder of Jobbatical, a platform that allows digital nomads to find work in other countries and helps with the logistics of getting there.

The company also embodies a new world of highly-skilled, global migratory workers who work wherever they please. “Our own team today is forty people and they have flown in from sixteen different countries,” Hindriks explained about a recent all-hands gathering. “One of our engineers is from Colombia, and living in Talinn, and he was hosting a Couchsurfer who flew in from Malaysia and he was our engineer in Mexico, and he was now moving to Denmark. This is the perfect example of how the world should be, and how it will be in five or ten years.”

Benedict Anderson famously called the population of a nation state an “imagined community,” but today’s global workers have a very different community that they are imagining.

From cryptocurrency millionaires in Puerto Rico to digital nomads in hotspots like Thailand, Indonesia, and Colombia, there is increasingly a view that there is a marketplace for governance, and we hold the power as consumers. Much like choosing a cereal from the breakfast department of a supermarket, highly-skilled professionals are now comparing governments online — and making clear-headed choices based on which ones are most convenient and have the greatest amenities available.

“There is a shift happening where the country isn’t fixating, the talent is fixating,” Hindriks said. Governments — at least, some of them — are realizing that the generators of wealth today increasingly have infinite choice about where they live. A little more friction in the immigration process from an extra visa form could mean hundreds of digital nomads simply switch their plane tickets somewhere else, depriving a country of innovative thought and critical revenues.

As the nation state moves toward this new form of networked sovereignty though, what are the challenges that such transience cause? Is it possible to merge the growing excitement and wanderlust of today’s innovative thinkers with the needs of local communities?

2017 was a ferocious year in the talent wars

Like any marketplace, cities and governments are now being ranked and compared online. Pieter Levels, a leader in the digital nomad community, has built Nomad List as a Kayak-like aggregator for potential work destinations. The platform allows users to compare different locations on a range of factors, such as internet bandwidth, price, nightlife vitality, and safety.

Much as airlines ferociously compete for top billing on Kayak, governments are increasingly competing with each other to reach the top rankings and earn the business of these itinerant global workers.

That brain gain is a completely new development for much of the world. Brain drain, mostly to the United States, has been the story in the developing world for decades in the post-World War II global economy. No other country has mastered the pipeline of talent that America has built. Every year, a million international students come to the US and attend American universities. Many of these international students will ultimately stay and build a life in their adopted country.

Other countries have watched this pattern with envy, but have felt powerless to stop it. That is, until recently. Blame Trump, blame strapped research and university budgets, blame weariness of American culture, but there is a sense among politicians across the world that the best talent is suddenly available for the taking. Now, these governments are offering increasingly generous immigration terms to attract the next-generation of their startup, research, and professional workforces.

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Networked sovereignty brings up complicated questions. For instance, what rights should be conferred on people who spend a quarter of their time in one city? Should they be considered “fractional citizens,” with perhaps a fractional right to vote?

Few countries have made quite as stark of an about-face as Japan, which has traditionally been among the most isolated countries in the world. In 2016, the country of 127 million only had 4,732 professional migrants on visas, or roughly 0.003%. Only 297 of those professionals hailed from North America.

Last year, the Abe government pushed for changes to the highly-skilled professional visa program that would allow professionals to gain permanent residency in as short as one year, down from ten years. In addition, the government has tried to elevate the brand recognition of Japanese universities, while also reforming its research grant program to make the system more competitive internationally.

We see a similar set of initiatives from Canada. It has made its startup visa program permanent, which will officially launch at the end of March this year. Plus, it is embarking on a massive expansion of research funding for artificial intelligence and other fields to attract superstar researchers.

The story is similar elsewhere. France is placing a huge emphasis on attracting startup talent to the country, particularly founders, business professionals, and investors. China has aggressively sought to bring back its citizens from abroad through outreach and better funding initiatives, and the country has just launched a national strategy around artificial intelligence that frankly dwarfs the plans of any other country.

More is coming. According to Hindriks of Jobbatical, Estonia and Malaysia are now considering digital nomad-style visas that would allow self-employed professionals to attain visas without an employer sponsor.

In short, 2017 was a watershed year for governments to transform their innovation ecosystems, and the keen competition for top talent is forcing countries to lower the friction to cross their borders. To be fair, it’s one thing to announce a new visa program, and another to actually implement it. Canada’s startup visa program only accepted 100 people total over a trial three year period. Nonetheless, the momentum behind these reforms isn’t going to abate any time soon.

The rise of networked sovereignty

With the increasing flows of migrant talent, we are witnessing the rise of a new “networked sovereignty,” where people have attachments to countries built up over a lifetime of mobility — and they may not even live there.

That is the challenge of the narcissism of today’s digital nomad: it’s about freedom of movement, but not responsibility to engage.

For instance, Estonia has its e-residency program, which allows the holder to use digital credentials that provide access to Estonian resources and programs, even when the bearer isn’t physically located inside the country. That creates a long-term relationship between a worker, who may move between different countries, and Estonia that can be quite substantial. Such programs blur the classic distinction between who is in and who is out at the heart of citizenship.

Networked sovereignty brings up complicated questions. For instance, what rights should be conferred on people who spend a quarter of their time in one city? Should they be considered “fractional citizens,” with perhaps a fractional right to vote? Estonia, which in many ways has been the vanguard in these movements, does allow foreign nationals with permanent residency to vote in local elections, although permanent residence is far different from a resident who spends a few weeks a year in a country.

Crunchbase

OverviewOur platform helps companies and individuals throughout the recruiting and hiring process. Jobbatical is the solution for the people who’d like to find new jobs abroad, we also assist with immigration to countries such as Spain, Germany, Finland, Estonia and more, and provide additional services to enable people work where they are happy.

Location
Tallinn, Harjumaa

Categories
Employment, Skill Assessment, Professional Services

FoundersAllan Mäeots, Karoli Hindriks, Ronald Hindriks

Website
http://jobbatical.com/

Full profile for Jobbatical

Such a model has little precedent, but the theories behind it have been explored in fiction, such as in science fiction author Malka Older’s two novels, Infomocracy and Null State. In Older’s future world, nation states have been mostly abolished and replaced with what she calls “microdemocracy” of 100,000 person “centenals” with absolute freedom of movement for every person. Want to switch from a drug paradise to a militarized autocratic government? You could potentially just walk down the street and automatically switch borders.

The books are thrillers, but along the way, we can learn and experience the challenges and heady opportunities of what competitive governance looks like. To continue to exist, governments in each centental need to have 100,000 people, which means they need to attract a specific audience to their borders to remain in existence. Governments become franchises, and a global organization called Information (a sort of Google meets the United Nations hybrid) provides seemingly objective and continuous information about the world, so that citizens can make the best decisions.

In its ideal form, networked sovereignty lines up with liberal values of open trade, open borders, and human freedoms. Highly-skilled migrants have choices on where they want to live, and their demands for quality of life, amenities, rights, and freedoms create competition among governments to be more open and satiate those desires. A country that even implies that it is backtracking on that openness can suddenly find a gaping hole in its incoming stream of talent, one that might not be easy to repair. Mobility essentially becomes the new Bill of Rights.

What is local in a globalized world?

Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, once famously said that “All politics is local.” What he meant was that while the macro issues of the day of finance or foreign affairs may blare from the newspapers, the views of voters are fundamentally shaped by what they experience every day. A street light that has burnt out and isn’t repaired quickly is likely to have much more of an effect on a voter’s impression of government competence than an editorial in the New York Times.

What, then, is local politics if residents are never actually there to commit their time, talents, and energy to improve a neighborhood? Who sits on an architectural review board, or on a school board or city council? What does representation mean?

The pragmatic answer is that not everyone is migrating all the time (the pithy answer is “blockchain”). Migration is generally a youthful activity, and as people marry and have kids they are significantly less likely to move between countries on a regular basis. The idea that a majority of a city’s population is going to be cosmopolitan business travelers is a fantasy that simply doesn’t match reality.

A far more challenging question though is what happens when times go bad. A recession hits, or a disaster takes place, and suddenly some of the most important professionals in an urban ecosystem flee to their next ideal city, leaving the rest of the population to try to fix the problem.

That is the challenge of the narcissism of today’s digital nomad: it’s about freedom of movement, but not responsibility to engage. The loyalty of patriotism is replaced by a kind of brand loyalty, and there are dozens of other brands on the government shelf. There is a supposed mutualism between the digital nomad and the local population: the former brings prosperity and an innovative outlook, the latter provides for the quality amenities that attract the nomads. But ultimately, only one of these groups has the ability to leave.

Governments are competing better to get talent into their countries, but now they need to work with nomads and global talent, and vice versa. We need to move toward a more expansive view that people can have multiple nations, and nations can share a single person. We all need to engage deeper with the places we live globally, and realize that it is not someone else’s job to make our neighborhood right.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a bombshell indictment Friday, implicating 13 Russian nationals and detailing a multi-year, costly, and widespread effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. At the center of that effort were Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram, which the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) used to recruit American followers, plan real-life rallies, and spread propaganda about issues like religion, immigration, and eventually Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Facebook and Instagram were mentioned in the indictment far more times—41—than other online platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and PayPal, which were each mentioned less than 12 times. Still, Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president of advertising, tweeted Friday that Russia’s ultimate goal “very definitively” was not to influence the election, but to “divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media.”

On one hand, Goldman is correct: Russia certainly aimed to deepen partisan divides and stir up chaos. But he is incorrect to assert that the Russians were not interested in influencing the election. That idea is at odds with both what we know about Russia’s use of social-media platforms and with Mueller’s indictment itself. For example, Goldman overlooked the massive impact Russians had with ordinary posts, as opposed to paid ads. Most important, he also appears to misunderstand what the Russians really used the ads for.

Saturday, President Trump seized on Goldman’s tweets to argue that Russia didn’t influence the election. The president implied that media organizations were falsely reporting that it had.

Goldman maintains that the Russians were not trying to influence the election, in part, because they organized protests on “both sides,” which is true. Some of the Russians’ propaganda efforts were designed simply to cause confusion, distrust, and sow division. However that doesn’t mean they weren’t also attempting to do everything in their power to ensure Clinton wasn’t elected. The IRA had dozens of full-time employees and spent over $1 million a month on its efforts, according to the indictment.

Mueller’s indictment clearly indicates Russia’s operatives were aiming to influence the 2016 election against Clinton, and in favor of Trump and Bernie Sanders, a task they began working on as early as 2014. Russian operatives were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them),” according to the indictment. The operatives behind the Facebook group “Secured Borders” were even criticized for not having enough posts dedicated to disparaging Clinton.

Most troubling, the Russians encouraged minority groups like African Americans to stay away from the polls. In October 2016, an Instagram account called “Woke Blacks” published a messaging saying that voting for Hillary was “the lesser of the two devils…we’d surely be better of without voting AT ALL,” according to the indictment.

“It’s far more concerning that they were taking and targeting groups to remove them from the process of voting,” says Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who has been tracking Russia’s propaganda efforts since before the election. “It underscores the fact that you don’t know whether people are inauthentic or real.”

Goldman’s tweets not only contradict the indictment, they also indicate he doesn’t understand the true purpose of the ads. “The ads were just to get the ball rolling on this and to find the right people. It was really just an efficiency thing,” says Albright. “All the ads did and all they were meant to do was to refine targeting. It initiated the process of persuasion over long periods of time, like two years.” In other words, the ads were just designed to get people to like certain Facebook pages or to follow specified Instagram accounts. They themselves weren’t always designed to be the propaganda, but instead meant to lure people in.

The propaganda was often distributed later. For example, one ad innocuously instructed people to follow a Facebook page if they were a follower of Jesus, but the page later spread a meme of Hillary Clinton with devil horns.

The Internet Research Agency’s ads on Facebook also only made up a tiny portion of its overall strategy. Facebook estimates that 10 million people saw paid ads, whereas up to 150 million people saw other content from fake accounts.

But the Russians’ influence was even broader, because of how other Facebook users reacted to their posts. Posts on just six of the IRA’s most popular Facebook pages received 340 million shares and nearly 20 million interactions, including likes, comments, page shares, and emoji reactions, according to Albright’s analysis. The Russians were similarly successful on Instagram: A single Russia-linked account received nearly 10 million interactions from January 2016 to August 2017.

Albright was careful to say the Russians may have gamed Facebook’s algorithms in order to produce such high engagement. It’s also possible that there are cracks in the way that Facebook measures user engagement, according to Albright. “There’s no question that some of these metrics and some of these total numbers of shares are inflated,” he says.

Since it was discovered that the Russians used Facebook to influence the election, the company has hired thousands more people to monitor ads and has also crafted stricter policies for buying political advertisements. “We proactively disclosed the IRA activity and have worked with investigators to give the public a fuller understanding of what occurred,” Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of Global Policy said in an emailed statement He added that Facebook is working closely with federal agencies, including the FBI, “on better ways to protect our country and the people on our platform.”

But at least one of the company’s top executives still seems unable to fully grasp with how Facebook was used to influence the election organically. Facebook did not respond to a follow-up request for comment regarding Goldman’s tweets. His statements only address Russia’s purchase of online ads, which, of course, is the focus of his job. But he fails to mention other ways Russia co-opted Facebook and makes it appear as though there are simple ways to resolve issues about foreign meddling online. In reality, Facebook, Congress, and the US public are still grappling with how Russia weaponized internet platforms to influence an election.

“There’s literally propaganda all over their platform still,” says Albright. “Some of these memes are still getting circulated, they’re very easy to find.”

Russia Revelations

It’s now undeniable that Russia attempted to disrupt the 2016 election, following the indictment of 13 Russians.

The indictment contained many revealing new details, but its description of the work of the Internet Research Agency was striking for its blandness.

The indictment also revealed how Russians appropriated American identities to hide in plain sight.